The most difficult part of LLMs and agents seems to be - surprisingly - humans.

Specifically, humans and their dysfunctions. Their fragility. Their ego tied to stuff.

This is an excellent post/reflection on the topic of solo LLM use. The only gap I see is that it assumes that one works on something alone and not in a team. Though, that might be a different essay in itself.

Edit: Turns out that footnote 3 actually mentions that already. Nice. Good post

Great post. I particularly like the 4 column pr view idea. I’ve built something similar to review speckit specs. The scaffolding to ensure that code actually works makes sense too.

There’s one thing that’s bothering me though — all of these have us consuming what LLMs produce. I learned and internalized how things worked by building systems. At least within the constraints of the abstractions I was using. This makes me think of TikTok and shorts. Everybody is just watching. Maybe that’s not charitable though. Maybe the abstraction has now changed from an “os/gui/event loop” to “llm” and the rest is just accidental complexity.

Making a quick prototype is probably the best way to find out if an idea is worth keeping. Vibe-coding it and then throwing it away seems like a good way to go?

>> A more serious irony is that the automatic control system has been put in place because it can do the job better than the operator, yet the operator is being asked to monitor that it is working effectively.

Automatic control is good for standard case, and the expected errors. For weird cases, for now humans are better to detect them and press the big red button.

i sometimes wonder how all carpenters or music producers in the world would react if tomorrow a magic box arrives where they type-in/dictate what they want and voila... out comes a table/composition.. Will the worlds music producers and carpenters just "accept" this new magic genie? I would hope they wont. Yet here we are as software engineers...ready to surrender our craft to mere "prompts" with reckless abandon.

"Yup, looks good to me!" said the human reviewing thousands of lines of generated code everyday.

This has become common now, and I've seen it ruin large projects until nobody understands the codebase full of verbose nonsensical code and comments. It becomes impossible to further develop the project without AI. Contributors not using AI for any reason are all leaving because no one enjoys working with mindless robots (and humans) as colleagues. It's demeaning and devaluing their labor and humanity. They're not getting "left behind", they are leaving the madness of crowds behind.

> ..the possibility of runaway dynamics: once a critical threshold is crossed, small increases in adoption can trigger rapid population-level shifts toward *persistent dependence, with abrupt losses in cognitive competence*.

We can all see it happening. As this technology permeates society, the challenge to maintain control, coherence, and quality will become greater and ever more serious - for example, AI in healthcare, military, management and governance.

I am often thinking recently of the littel loop diagrams from the "The Capability Trap" paper. We need to keep a loop reinvesting into our own Human capability in anything we're doing.

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This is copium that is gone with the wind when the models perform up to the level of standard that the user requires. I'll give the author 6 months before they feel like its okay to just send it.

Karpathy had the same trajectory. Primeagean had the same trajectory. I think in the end everyone except for Jonathan Blow will have the same trajectory